Early school leavers - Cultural change may be answer

WHEN someone leaves school before reaching leaving certificate level their options are limited but those options will be even more confined in the future.

In this situation there are nearly always life-defining, negative consequences for the individuals and their families. There is also a huge cost to the exchequer.

Many of those young men who left school early to avail of the opportunities in the construction sector during the boom now have neither work or the educational qualifications to help them get back to work.

The tragedy of all this is that the Government could save billions on dole payments to early school leavers by investing in education as early as pre-school.

Yesterday children’s advocacy group Barnardos suggested, in a report on educational disadvantage, that almost €10 billion is spent annually on welfare payments for people who left school early.

How much more satisfactory it would be if that huge sum was spent on education and changing the culture surrounding education. That investment would lead to the creation of possibility and change the lives of so many people caught in a vicious circle of low-pay and dead-end jobs.

The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) contributed to the report and pointed out that early school leavers are more likely to have health problems, are paid on average up to 20% less than those with leaving certificate or third level qualifications, and have a higher risk of being convicted of a crime, with 80% of a sample of Mountjoy prisoners in a 2002 study having left school before the age of 16.

The ESRI reminded us that nearly 25% of unemployed people left school early. Based on these figures Barnardos estimates that welfare payments to early school leavers are around €19 million a week, just under €10 billion a year.

Even if the country was not staggering towards something unprecedented these figures would demand attention. Dress it up any way you like this is a premium on our failure to change the culture that rejects education as a path of economic and material independence.

It might be easy to scoff at those age-old principles as so many of yesterday’s certainties fall around us but when this recession ends we will need a highly educated workforce and early school leavers will be left out in the cold.

Finding the resources to confront these issues will be a huge challenge at this time but it will be even more difficult to change the mind set, the deeply ingrained culture that does not see education as a path to self-fulfilment.

The depth of that challenge is represented by the difficulties the Department of Education programmes to combat educational disadvantage face as almost one-in-five teenagers do not finish second level education.

This statistic is not one we can be proud of or one easily associated with a modern progressive economy.

Like so many of the problems facing us the solution may lie outside our normal reference points and take longer than we might imagine to realise. We have to convince the communities that traditionally turn their back on education before they have realised their potential that their lives, and their families lives, and their communities can be better by changing their habits.

This has little enough to do with resources, rather it is a cultural challenge.